I installed Linux Mint for the first time on my personal Laptop just a few months ago, and it ran so well that I didn't want to mess with it to try out different distros.
But today, my company's IT department announced that they have some spare old Laptops to give away (technically because they didn't meet the specs for Windows 11, didn't stop the IT department from giving them out with Windows 11 pre installed though)
So now I got a few devices to play around with!! They're a Precision 7530 and a Latitude 7390 2-in-1!
I already got ZorinOS running on the little guy because apparently Zorin is nice for Touchscreen support. For the big guy I was initially thinking that I could try Bazzite, but the installer was like "Intel UHD Graphics aren't really recommended" so I might try something else first. Any recommendations? I mainly just want to try as many different flavors of Linux as I can haha
There is a Mint based on pure Debian if you think the Ubuntu-based one is "too fragile" as you put it. You actually made me curious in how you keep breaking Mint, I've been using it for several years, incrementally upgrading it since 2021 with little to no breakage at all.
So trying it again recently on a VM, seems like they changed their upgrades? Used to be a series of priority ranks. I think that confused the users. I think the ppas confused the users.
And making poor choices there broke it.
Ubuntu is just broken out of the box on the other hand. Every damn time since version 4 something stupid happens.
Yeah, PPAs usually complicate things. IIRC the advice is disabling them before upgrading major versions, but this can be a pain if you use many repositories simultaneously